North Korea on Monday blasted the US administration for pressurising Pyongyang with threatening remarks when US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Asia recently.

Tillerson said on Friday at a joint press conference with his South Korean counterpart Yun Byung-se in Seoul that all options were on the table to resolve the Korean Peninsula’s nuclear issue, including diplomatic, security and economic measures, Xinhua reported.

Tillerson said that a so-called “strategic patience” policy toward Pyongyang has ended, referring to the US foreign policy in the past decade under which Washington had refrained from having talks with Pyongyang before its sincere efforts at denuclearisation.

The top US diplomat indicated a need for tougher UN Security Council sanctions on North Korea’s nuclear programme and other weapons of mass destruction.

“Pyongyang has the will and capability to fully respond to any war the US would like to ignite,” said an unnamed spokesman for foreign ministry of North Korea in response to those remarks in a statement released by the state-run news agency KCNA.

“What matters is that neither Obama nor Tillerson knows the reason why the DPRK had to have access to nuclear weapons and why it is dynamically bolstering up the nuclear force,” said the spokesman.

He called the nuclear weapons of the DPRK “treasured sword of justice” and the “most reliable war deterrence to defend the socialist motherland and the life of its people.”

Tillerson began on Wednesday his first three-nation Asian tour that took him to Japan, South Korea and China.